Blog: Being Interns at IndigoVision

Last month we extended a warm welcome to this year's interns, Alex Shand and Robert Mitchell, two students from the University of Edinburgh. Alex is in his final undergraduate year studying a BEng Hons in Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering while Robert is about to start his final undergraduate masters year studying a MInf in Informatics (computer science). We have asked them to put together a blog about their experience with IndigoVision so far.

We have really enjoyed our first month at IndigoVision, it was a pleasant surprise to find that we were allowed to work in a style that best suited us as young professionals.

The first project that we were involved in covered the development of a sample application for the purpose of demonstrating the interaction between the Control Center Video SDK and the Control Center SiteDB SDK. Developers previously had examples which showed usage of the individual libraries, but not one that showed how they could be used together to build a complete application. The most recent project involved an investigation into networking protocols to determine whether improvements could be made to an existing system, and if so, provide recommendations for doing so.

We have learned a great deal about computer networking, an area that was previously foreign to us. It's been great gaining significant insight into the world of professional software engineering; the development tools, systems, and management processes required to develop professional grade software. In contrast to university, it's nice to be given a problem and very few restrictions in how we can go about solving it.

The experience we have gained in this professional environment so far has been very valuable. There are things that university does not teach, that may only be gained through experience. Having the practical experience working in a real software engineering department is going to be very useful to have on our CVs.